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2008 Pwnie Award Nominees Announced

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the my-little-pwnie dept.

ruphus13 writes "The Pwnie Awards, an 'annual awards ceremony celebrating and making fun of the achievements and failures of security researchers and the wider security community' announced their 2008 nominees. From their site, 'The final list of nominees for the nine Pwnie Award categories is finally published. We've received some really good submissions and it was not an easy task to narrow them down to five nominees per category, but we hope that we've done a good job. The next step for the Pwnie Awards judges will gather in an undisclosed location prior to the award ceremony and vote on the winners.'"

12 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory.. by nathan+s · · Score: 5, Funny

    OMG PWNIESS!!!

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    picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
    1. Re:Obligatory.. by pwnies · · Score: 5, Funny

      You called?

  2. Pwned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Their web server has been pwned.

    1. Re:Pwned by Nos. · · Score: 5, Informative

      Nominees

      We received 134 submissions for the Pwnie Awards, of which we've selected 37 nominees. Please select an award category from the list above to see the nominees.

      The winners of the Pwnie Awards will be anounced on August 6, 2008 at a ceremony at the BlackHat USA conference in Las Vegas.

      Pwnie for Best Server-Side Bug

      Awarded to the person who discovered the most technically sophisticated and interesting server-side bug. This includes any software that is accessible remotely without using user interaction.

      • Windows IGMP kernel vulnerability (CVE-2007-0069)

        Discovered by: Alex Wheeler and Ryan Smith

        Not only did Alex Wheeler and Ryan Smith lay claim to a lucky CVE number, they also laid down the law with a remote kernel code execution vulnerability that was exploitable in the default firewall configuration on Windows XP, 2003 and Vista. Despite the SWI team's claim that its exploitation is "unlikely in real-world conditions", Kostya Kortchinsky was able to develop a highly reliable exploit for this vulnerability.

      • NetWare kernel DCERPC stack buffer overflow

        Discovered by: Nicolas Pouvesle

        At REcon 2008, Nicolas Pouvesle demonstrated some amazing NetWare-Fu with his kernel exploitation techniques and staged payloads for a stack overflow in the DCERPC stack in the NetWare kernel. Besides impressing everyone at the conference (not to mention all of the Quebecois women around Montreal), he also struck fear into the hearts of NetWare administrators everywhere. All three of them.

        This vulnerability also shows how there can often be similar vulnerabilities in different implementations of the same functionality. And when a vulnerability in one implementation is found and fixed, similar bugs in other implementations may go unnoticed for a while. What does it take to make a vendor like Novell audit their DCERPC code for simple vulnerabilities? A widespread worm exploiting a stack overflow in the Microsoft DCERPC stack, crippling large portions of the Internet, and supposedly causing a blackout of the entire East Coast of the USA? Apparently not.

      • ClamAV Remote Command Execution (CVE-2007-4560)

        Discovered by: Nikolaos Rangos

        This vulnerability was a remote command injection in the recipient e-mail address of an e-mail message examined by the ClamAV open-source AntiVirus scanner. In a nod to 1993, ClamAV called sendmail with popen(), placing the recipient e-mail address right there in the command. With open source anti-virus products, Linus's Law clearly does hold: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs shallow", even the ones that we knew about fifteen years ago.

      • SQL Server 200

  3. Slashdotted in under 10 minutes! by russlar · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did we just set some sort of record?

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    Anybody want my mod points?
  4. Most EPIC fail, Windows Vista? by djveer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the "Most Epic FAIL" section... "Windows Vista for proving that security does not sell $100,000,000 invested in security and what does Microsoft have to show for it? Customers are revolting against Windows Vista and nobody who has a choice is chosing to upgrade. It doesn't matter that Vista really is the most secure Microsoft operating system ever made, all customers care about is the annoyance of the UAC prompts, the confusing user interface and the insane hardware requirements."

    I can agree with that completely. Windows Vista is significantly better for security than it's predecessor and had fewer vulnerabilities in the first year of release. However if people are so frustrated by the usability, hardware requirements, and confusing UAC prompts that they don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole, that sort of seems like they're heading the wrong direction to me. They should be concentrating on making it more secure without direct user intervention.

    1. Re:Most EPIC fail, Windows Vista? by jd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Way back in the mists of time, part of my University training was on Human-Computer Interfaces and how not to design them. One of the first things we were told about was excessive alerts and excessive confirmations. It just causes the user to be desensitized to those things that are important, and they end up hitting the given key or clicking the necessary box without really reading any of the dialog presented. This actually worsens security. Especially if there's any way to silence such warnings, by disabling them for example, or having a utility that injects a confirmation into the module that handles the dialog.

      I believe security can sell, but that paranoia and pestering won't. Mandatory access controls, role-based access controls and POSIX access control lists do not require pestering dialog. There are general-purpose operating systems rated A1 on the old Orange Book scale - the highest rating for host security you can get - and I doubt a single one requires massive user intervention to do anything more complex than Solitaire.

      I would argue, then, that the article is wrong on Vista, that Vista is NOT the most secure offering from Microsoft because users stop trusting the security facility and are more likely to accidentally permit applications to do something stupid. You have to consider th wetware, and the wetware is very easily overloaded with trivia. Vista is only the most secure offering from Microsoft if nobody uses it.

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      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  5. coral cache link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thanks for slashdotting my poor little server on a DSL line :-)

    Try this: http://pwnie-awards.org.nyud.net/2008/awards.html

    Alexander Sotirov
    Pwnie Awards

    1. Re:coral cache link by russlar · · Score: 5, Funny

      Can we nominate you for a Pwnie Award for hosting a server on a DSL line?

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      Anybody want my mod points?
  6. Re:Site seems to be PWNED by jorgevillalobos · · Score: 5, Funny

    Concern? Their collapsed server is now more secure than it has ever been!

  7. Re:Do I win? by CRiyl · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, you need 2007 more of you to count. ;-)

  8. We are now unslashdotted... by dinodaizovi · · Score: 5, Informative

    We quickly moved the site to a server with real bandwidth. So slashdot away!

    Cheers,

    Dino Dai Zovi
    Pwnie Awards